Shell Element Formulation Based Finite Element Modeling, Analysis and Experimental Validation of Incremental Sheet Forming Process

This paper presents the effect of shell element formulations on the response parameters of incremental sheet metal forming process. In this work, computational time, profile prediction and thickness distribution are investigated by both finite element analysis and experimentally. The experimental results show that the thickness distribution is in good agreement with the results obtained with Belytschko-Tsay (BT) and Improved Flanagan-Belytschko (IFB) shell element formulations. These two shell element formulations do trade-off between computational time and accuracy. For more accurate results, the BT shell element formulation is better and for less computational time with good results, the IFB shell element is preferable. Finally, BT shell element formulation has been chosen for FE Analysis of ISF process in HyperWorks, since the results of thickness distribution and profile prediction is in better agreement with the experimental results as well as the computational time is less among the shell elements.